Today, I feel pretty good.

Yesterday was very meh, but today, the sun is shining, the local rugrat squad is in school so it’s nice and quiet, and I will be going out to dinner with my friends tonight.

Oh, and I did a video that required more than just me talking, and I am proud of that.

Here it is.

As you can see, I did my “interpretive subbing” thing again, where I take some clips of non-English video and add what I think they are saying, or wish they were saying, or what it sounds like to ME.

You know… silly stuff.

It’s a hell of a lot of work, but it’s worth it. What I produced is two and a half minutes of fairly high density comedy (other than that gap when the father discovers the Satanic Bible) that I am proud to have made. It’s fun stuff!

And what the hell, it kept me busy for a while, and that’s something I need these days.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I pry the cold hands of constant dysthymic depression off my heart and my soul. They have been squeezing the life out of me for too long with their crushing grip of anti-action bias and fractally nested phobias. I have been afraid of life, the universe, and everything for far too long and I will only change that if I make myself the cold dead tide of depression.

A big big part of that will be convincing myself, deep down where it really counts, that I am happier when I am doing things than I am when I am idle or just killing time. It’s demonstrably true, but part of the true madness of depression, under all the justifications and analyses, is that it can make you physically, emotionally, chemically incapable of believing certain things no matter what the proof.

And that is where the real fight of depression takes place. You have to wear down the massive resistance to doing anything that is not insanely profitable in the hedonic equation sense and learn, truly learn, and truly believe, that there are things which are a lot of effort to do, but totally worth it.

And that there is great relief to be found from the pain that abounds inside you simply from working hard at something. Depression makes you feel like you have so little energy that you can’t afford to invest it in anything that does not reap enormous rewards.

In essence, it skews your hedonic equation by putting an insane price on every tiny bit of effort, thus insuring that it is nearly impossible to turn a profit.

But the truth is, you get out of life what you put into it. Not always on a one to one scale, but over time it always evens out eventually. And you always have to make the first move. Life is not sitting there just waiting for your approval. Nobody is going to actively seek you and force you to use your talents and energies to connect with the world and make yourself happy.

The initiative is always yours. You are the only one who can invest energy in your own life. There is plenty of joy, pleasure, and happiness in the world, but you have to go out there and find it. It is not going to come looking for you.

So life requires motion. Change. Risk. Danger. Challenge. Exploration of the unknown. Following paths without knowing where they lead. And not letting fear of discomfort or effort keep you locked away in a tiny coffin of your design.

Are you really so sure that nothing could be good enough to make you glad you faced your fears, went out on your own, and took whatever the world handed you? How can you be so sure? The very fact that you have done so little exploring in your life virtually guarantees that you do not know enough about the world and all its possibilities to make that judgment.

Sure, you know a lot. But knowledge is not experience. It is absolutely true that “you never know till you try”. You can’t spend your life buried alive under fear.

You have to push against that wall of fear and pain and push it back. Not all the time and not all at once, but whenever you can. And you never give up, and never surrender.

Focus your anger and your hate on the depression itself. It’s the real cause of all your problems anyhow. It richly deserves total, merciless destruction.

It is not too late. You can still rise from your grave and return to the world of the living. When you are ready, you can face the dawn, feel the sun on your skin again, and stride into a brand new day.

It is a prize of infinite value, worth any and all costs in energy and effort to secure it.

And as a bonus, if you work hard, you will job all the craziness in your head of its energy source (your inaction) and starve the damned thing to death!

Think of it as investing in your own sanity. You have vast untapped energies trapped behind the cold steel wall of your depression. You could be a far, far more active person than you are if you just opened yourself to the possibility.

Dare to dream of a better version of you. Stronger, happier, more effective, less afraid, confident, tough, and ready to take on the world.

Dream that person into being and you can become them. But first you have to be willing to imagine them. It is one of the most potent tools against depression you have : your imagination.

Imagine victory. Imagine freedom. Imagine happiness. Imagine love. Imagine all that is good in the world coming into your life.

Imagine victory. It can be yours. It is possible. Not everybody who becomes depressed stays that way for the rest of their lives. People do escape, it happens all the time.

Fight, goddamn it, FIGHT!